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Using small-town life as a springboard to explore the loftiest of ideas, Haven Kimmel’s irresistibly smart and generous first novel is at once a romance and a haunting meditation on grief and faith. Langston Braverman returns to Haddington, Indiana (pop. 3,062) after walking out on an academic career that has equipped her for little but lording it over other people. Amos Townsend is trying to minister to a congregation that would prefer simple affirmations to his esoteric brand of theology.

What draws these difficult—if not impossible—people together are two wounded little girls who call themselves Immaculata and Epiphany. They are the daughters of Langston’s childhood friend and the witnesses to her murder. And their need for love is so urgent that neither Langston nor Amos can resist it, though they do their best to resist each other. Deftly walking the tightrope between tragedy and comedy, The Solace of Leaving Early is a joyous story about finding one’s better self through accepting the shortcomings of others.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Kimmel delivers a first novel of big ideas and exquisite characters. Sweet and smart, her book feels like a present.” —Entertainment Weekly

“A quirky, literary love story . . . best read for its characters, its surprising phrasing and the way it deals with all sorts of ideas, including the possibility of improbable love.” —USA Today

“Kimmel, whose sunny memoir of growing up in Indiana, A Girl Named Zippy, was so charming, here extends her range, wrestling, like Jacob with the angel, with deep questions of faith and responsibility. And the reader is the lucky winner.” —The Times-Picayune

“Kimmel gives us a stunning bird’s-eye view of rural American life, as damning as it is affectionate.” — Los Angeles Times

"The Solace of Leaving Early is by turns funny and sad and perplexing and compassionate." —The Miami Herald

"[The Solace of Leaving Early]. . . explores the mores of community as thoroughly as John Updike and delineates character as finely as Jonathan Franzen." —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Filled with shattering revelations . . . her characters [are] electrifying— this compassionate book is one that begs to be sampled and savored.” —The Stanford Herald

"A captivating book with ragged edges. . . . Rare are the writers who can bring head and heart and wit to bear on their fictional landscapes. Kimmel proves she's one of them." —The Plain Dealer

“A sweet and satisfying reward . . . more delicious than a gooey dessert.” ----—Midwest Living

"Intelligent and compassionate." —Publishers Weekly

"The Solace of Leaving Earlyis a beautiful meditation on what it means to be home, and how home can be found in the most unexpected places." -Bookpage

"There must have been a time when John Updike had only just begun, a time when Carol Shields wasn't known much outside Ottawa. And there must have been some readers then who got to experience the bliss of knowing that they would witness the trajectory of these writers' careers. Hear me this: Haven Kimmel is a reason for great happiness." —The Orlando Sentinel

From the Inside Flap

Using small-town life as a springboard to explore the loftiest of ideas, Haven Kimmel's irresistibly smart and generous first novel is at once a romance and a haunting meditation on grief and faith. Langston Braverman returns to Haddington, Indiana (pop. 3,062) after walking out on an academic career that has equipped her for little but lording it over other people. Amos Townsend is trying to minister to a congregation that would prefer simple affirmations to his esoteric brand of theology. What draws these difficult--if not impossible--people together are two wounded little girls who call themselves Immaculata and Epiphany. They are the daughters of Langston's childhood friend and the witnesses to her murder. And their need for love is so urgent that neither Langston nor Amos can resist it, though they do their best to resist each other. Deftly walking the tightrope between tragedy and comedy, The Solace of Leaving Early is a joyous story about finding one's better self through accepting the shortcomings of others.

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The Solace of Leaving Early is the best thing I've read in quite a while. It's beautiful, brilliantly written. Every character is fascinating. I wish they were all real people, and that we were friends. Haven Kimmel reveals each of them to us like a multi-petal flower opening in one of those time-lapse photos. We see the bud and the hint of what is to come, and then as each petal unfolds, we get another and another and another explosive detail until we're dazzled and dazed by the colors and scents of the full bloom. Each of Kimmel's characters is tormented. They've been wounded by events that are also revealed---unfolded---to us slowly. We’re told the story through Langston and Amos' eyes. Thirty-year old Langston has come back to her small-town home and family after, without explanation, walking out of her final PhD orals exam. Amos is a bachelor minister who seems better suited to teaching esoteric, highly intellectual religion courses at an ivy-league university than preaching Sunday services to his farming-community parishioners. We're treated to their fascinating inner and spoken dialogs about religious history, faith, doubt, passion, despair, and betrayal. I found these little treatises incredibly thought provoking, and many worthy of further exploration. As a really good book should do, it had me alternately crying and laughing. And when I finished the last page, I did what I've done with only a few books in my life, I went back to the beginning and started reading the story all over again. It's just as delicious and satisfying the second time around.

After having read A Girl Named Zippy and She Got Up off the Couch, which I loved for their irreverent humor side by side with her gritty realistic look at family life in a small town, I was really excited to read this novel, but I was sadly disappointed. The characters have not grabbed me in the way Zippy and her family did and I am struggling to finish it.

A lot of this book seemed over my head as I was reading it. But it is beautifully written and kept me engaged. Through the day I found myself thinking about it; chewing on the text to better digest it....which is what I love about a book. Not a quick, nice read...but a work with depth. Would definitely recommend to the right reader.

If you've read Haven Kimmel's hilarious memoirs, A Girl Named Zippy and She Got Up Off the Couch, don't expect the same style of writing in this novel. The book started out so heavy with uninteresting detail that I almost didn't get beyond the first chapter. The story, once it got going, held my interest until half-way through, when the it again got bogged down in boring detail. I put the book aside until my patience returned. Another reviewer might be generous and compare Kimmel's style to John Updike.

As a huge fan of A Girl Named Zippy, I was somewhat disappointed in The Solace of Leaving Early. What I loved about Zippy is that it was such an easy read, written in simple language, but yet observant & well written. I found The Solace of Leaving Early to be an entirely different writing style, that at times was tough to read. Kimmel is a very talented writer, and she did create two very quirky characters who the novel centers around; Langston Braverman & Amos, the local pastor. Both Langston & Amos, unknowingly are facing many of the same struggles, but yet, can't seem to stand each other. Kimmel takes us down a path of realization as these two characters struggle with the circumstances they unwillingly find themselves in. Issues of guilt, finding your calling, and unconditional love are explored. Do not read The Solace of Leaving Early expecting another Zippy as they are two totally different types of writing. Even though I didn't love Solace, it's still clear that Kimmel is a talented writer, and I look forward to more of her works.

This is a novel about domestic abuse and it's after effects on an entire community. What makes this more sensitive, is that the community is a very small town in Indiana and the people that live there have known each other for a lifetime.The impact of the abuse is more personalized because of the familiarity of the townsfolk and the reactions of the surviviors more exposed and accountable. With domestic abuse comes grief, and grief can beget unresolved grief, which is ripe in this tightly knit clan from Haddington, Indiana.Presenting a touching story of two little girls exposed to the brutal slaying of their mother, Author Kimmel allows the event to rip through the town's church where the guilt and grief card is played handsomely by Pastor Amos Townsend. The pastor is suddenly in charge of coordinating the future of the two traumatized children by the basically geriatric and infirmed relatives. Confronted with the prospects of adopting the children out, Pastor Townsend searches to work out a solution. Heavily leaning on Anna Braverton, fellow churchgoer and intellectual confidant, Amos struggles to provide guidance and compose sermons for his congregation in one of the most personally challenging periods of his life.At the same time, Langston Braverman (daughter of Anna and Walt) aborts her PH.D. and all prospects as a university professor by walking out on her orals, packing up her dilapidated car and heading home with her faithful dog, Germane. She unexpectantly shows up at her childhood home, moves back into her attic bedroom and settles down to selfish moping. While she becomes aware of the little girls by studying them through her attic window, she decidedly refuses to hear the details of their mother's death, professing that it should be no one's buisness but their own. But, just like a small town, neighbor's lives get tangled, and despite all Langston's attempts to stay uninvolved, others work to make her a key player in the future of two tragically orphaned sisters.